Sun, Dec 09, 2007 page6

• 'Diesel engine' Italian PM keeps going despite odds

  • NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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  The pace was not fast, but not plodding either, and Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi's jogging companions were glowing with an appropriate sweat. But not Prodi, the famously unexcitable leader, who, it can be reported, does not get worked up even when working out. Up until the very end of a recent morning run at Villa Bor-ghese, he seemed completely dry.

  This could be interpreted several ways.

  He may be 68, but he is in great shape -- physically, if rarely politically. Or perhaps his body is made of the same stuff as his personality, so low key that a popular comic recently nicknamed him "Valium."

  Or maybe it is evidence of an endurance that has allowed him to survive for a year and a half with terrible poll numbers, a fractious coalition and daily predictions that his center-left government will collapse, inviting the return of his more emotive predecessor, Silvio Berlusconi.

  In his campaign last year, he called himself a "diesel engine," not so peppy, maybe, but built to keep going.

  "Honestly, the metaphor was not badly placed," Prodi said of himself, in his deep voice and good English, during 40 minutes of simultaneous jogging and talking. "Because I did everything despite all the difficulties."

  For some Italians, the metaphor is less flattering: that of dull, disciplined, solitary grinding on, especially compared with the 71-year-old Berlusconi, the richest man in Italy, who does not run but flits around in his private helicopter, entertains at his mansions and gets in public spats with his wife over other women.

  "Berlusconi is sex," said Giuliano Ferrara, editor of a conservative daily newspaper, Il Foglio, and a former Berlusconi spokesman. "Prodi is sport."

  But endurance seems, for the moment, to be paying off. Prodi is enjoying something of a surge, despite political turmoil high even by the standards of Italian politics. Last month, he survived an exceedingly difficult Senate vote on his budget and remained standing even as Berlusconi worked hard to bring the government down.

  As a result, his government's popularity rating rose 4 points last month, a poll conducted by Renato Mannheimer, a professor at the University of Milan, and published in the newspaper Corriere della Sera showed. That was good for Prodi, but still, only a dismal 35 percent of Italians felt his government was working well.

  Prodi was blunt about the fact that he confronts the same central difficulty now as when he was elected -- his problem is not just Berlusconi and the center-right opposition, but keeping together his own coalition, made up of nine parties who agree on little.

  This has made the job of substantial change difficult, at a time of growing fears in Italy that it is falling behind the rest of Europe. Prodi has managed to push through two economic reform packages and to stir the economy from zero growth. But he faces criticism for presiding over a government so divided that little gets done -- a criticism he does not dismiss entirely

  "In a democracy, the problem is to keep the majority," he said. "We have only a one-vote majority."

  Even though his government has lasted longer than many expected, and despite his own recent uptick in popularity, Prodi's staying power may now be facing its deepest challenge. Both the left and the right are configuring themselves in unprecedented ways, which may not include a long-running role for Prodi.

  On the left, the two biggest parties recently united behind Rome's popular mayor, Walter Veltroni, who has become a sort of prime minister in the wings. On the right, Berlusconi has shed his own allies to try a third comeback on his own.

  The two sides have begun preliminary talks to redo the nation's electoral law, considered by all sides flawed because it creates exactly the unstable parliamentary majority that makes Prodi's life so difficult. Many people, Berlusconi in the lead, argue that once a new electoral law is agreed on, elections should be held immediately. With Veltroni the new leader of the center-left party structure, Prodi could well be left out.

  Prodi appeared unruffled by the prospect.

  First, he said, any changes in the electoral law would take a long time. Plus, he said, a new law could be written to take effect after a certain waiting period, leaving him if not his full five years, something close to it, before returning to his teaching job.

  "It could be a guarantee, a guarantee for an easy life," he joked as his jog neared its end.
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